Dracula is a single father. His beloved daughter, who takes the place of Bram Stoker’s Lucy Westenra and “Mina” Harker, is just turning 118. He is scared she might move out of his secret hotel for monsters.

Commentary

If one’s attention is confined to the character-based comedic writing and its animated implementation, this is very good. As a children’s film it’s a cut above the norm insofar as the villain is the protagonist, although his “change of heart” comes too easily, is received far too warmly by his customers—on the basis of an insincere theory of love—and costs him virtually nothing. Even the burns disappear with a quick texture meld within a scene.

No reasons are given why all monsters, even the sane Invisible Man (1933) and The Wolf Man (1941), both living outside of Dracula’s staged world, have lost touch with humanity and bought into the hotel owner’s propaganda. Instead, we get vapid celebratory representations of that humanity, like a kick scooter, a halfpipe reference, autotune and rap, contrasted against extra slow bingo: a mean-spirited parody of old people, painfully at odds with the atmosphere of the hotel in every other scene. Outside the character interactions, it’s a weak script, and the writers know it. There are numerous goofs, e.g. the contact lenses inserted to explain why Dracula cannot mind-control the problem away, whereupon he mind-controls a pilot through a windshield. Even the costly animation has its flaws: At dawn the sunlight moves upward across the castle roof, perhaps because the director wanted Mavis to burn her foot and didn’t care or think.

In a perversion of the already complex development of this “franchise”, there was a new “book of the film” for this version: James Hart’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”. I look forward to the book of the film of “James Hart’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula”.